From The Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett, Mentor and Editor of Literary Genius by Helen Smith (2017):
Edward … also recommended that Duckworth publish Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs (1915), the first of the series of thirteen volumes that make up Pilgrimage, which conveys the experiences and inner life of Miriam Henderson. Richardson was grateful to Edward, both for his “illuminating guidance through the murkier depths of Pilgrimage,” as she put it in one of her rather arch letters to him, and for his reviews of the novels in The Nation in which he defended her against charges of formlessness. “There are readers who will ask for ‘unity and design’ in the plan of this book, Edward conceded in his review of The Tunnel (1919),
and those who complain that they don’t find “the reality which underlies the appearances”. But these readers must not ask Miriam to dive for their pearls, she is snatching at and bringing up the most wonderful things, by handfuls, just as they float and wave and interpenetrate in the flow and surge of old London’s living tunnel.
When he reviewed the next volume, Interim, a yera later Edward again concentrated on Richardson’s representation of the “feminine multiple consciousness” and castigated those readers who demand “clarity, construction, and form in every ‘picture'”, pointing out that it is not Richardson’s intention to create “pictures” but rather “an acute registration of the fluid feminine perceptiveness” and that this requires a new method. “Your article in The Nation … set me in a glow,” declared Richardson, who had suffered the complaints of the reviewer in the London Mercury that the novel was fragmentary and abnormal.
Garnett had to overcome some resistance to Richardson’s techniques within Duckworth and from some of his more senior authors. W. H. Hudson, author of Green Mansions, wrote to complain that Garnett was too soft on Richardson: “One gets rather sick and tired of her everlasting Marian [sic]. At any rate, I don’t want to see all of a person’s inside.”